"Dear Alana" Podcast Reveals The Tragedy Around Conversion Therapy

 With the writers -- and now the actors -- on strike, it looks increasingly like there will not be a new broadcast TV season this fall. 

Where will consumers of media find new content with these labor stoppages? 

 Podcasting and Tenderfoot TV to the rescue.

The Atlanta-based independent content production studio has announced today a slate of new investigative true-crime shows, powerful narratives, spinoffs, and new weekly talk shows for the remainder of 2023. 

One of those promising shows is premiering soon, with the first two episodes of Dear Alana being released on August 14, 2023. New episodes will be released each Monday, anywhere podcasts are available, with two additional bonus episodes coming later in the season. Tenderfoot+ subscribers can binge all eight episodes ad-free on August 14.

 You can listen to the trailer here.

  When Alana Chen died at the age of 24 in Boulder, she left behind two dozen journals chronicling a deep faith, love of fashion, and passion to become a nun. She also harbored a secret. At 14, she confessed to her priest that she was attracted to women. That priest convinced her not to tell her parents, and for seven years, Alana covertly sought pastoral counsel and conversion therapy. 

After being hospitalized for depression, she ended her life in 2019. When Simon Fung learned of her story, he reached out to her family to offer comfort. His own life was shockingly similar: he too sought out conversion therapy for nearly a decade in his efforts to become a priest. As he discovers more about Alana’s brief life and their overlapping experiences, he’s compelled to understand the truth of what happened to her—and finally face what happened to him.

Dear Alana is a gripping limited series hosted by Simon Kent Fung that explores the life and tragic death of devout youth Alana Chen, whose aspiration to become a nun led her to conversion therapy. The discovery of her extensive journals reveals her hidden struggles with her sexuality and faith. Simon, who shares a strikingly similar past, offers solace to Alana’s family and embarks on a quest to uncover the truth behind her fate, while confronting his own demons.

The dual-narrative podcast explores the psychological theories behind conversion therapy today, goes behind the scenes of an ascendant brand of American Catholicism sweeping college campuses now, and unearths the complicated boundary between earnest faith and spiritual manipulation, the promise of perfection and the price we pay to belong. The eight-episode podcast series is both an unraveling mystery and a poignant spiritual memoir.

“Telling powerful and profound stories will always be at the center of what we create, and this slate embodies the repertoire of content that focuses on new innovative ways to tell these stories from narrative storytelling to talk format,” said Tenderfoot TV CEO and co-founder, Donald Albright. “We’re excited to continue to diversify the content we’re covering, like the story of Alana Chen in Dear Alana, and give a voice and platform to the marginalized and forgotten.”